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Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

kimchi-reader.app

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Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#41

Post by jroesch »

voussoir wrote: post #24
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #21

For the first year or so, pretty much everyone who's learning is going to need the romanization alongside / above the Hangul. It's probably always going to be true that more than 2/3 of your potential customers -- 2/3 of the people who come to the website looking to see if this is for them -- will be in this category. There is a kind of anti-pattern in tools of this kind where the people building them already know so…

I absolutely disagree. Romanized Korean is harder to read than Korean itself. The sounds implied by the roman spelling do not match the sounds you're supposed to make, and you lose the syllable boundaries that aid in pronunciation. I feel like a caveman stumbling over my letters when I try to read a romanized word. A one-page alphabet reference chart would be enough to remind the reader which letter is which without…

I agree with this after a short while I turned off the romanization in many learning apps as it just messes with/undermines your actual learning.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#42

Post by alaanor »

ammmir wrote: post #39

thanks for making this. i've spent 5 minutes on this, but haven't been able to get it to work yet, the extension popup's Parse and Extract buttons are grayed out. do i need a sub to try it out? a few general remarks: the landing page above-the-fold is just ugly, the color gradient is horrendous, and the top screenshot of a video is... blank. at first i tried to click the play button, but nothing happened. then i real…

Hey thanks for the awesome comment! Yeah you do need a sub (a free trial to be manually activated, big mistake on my end there, I should have made that flow better, lesson learned with this post.)

I get the frustration with the landing page and I think you are right. I was not exactly perfectly happy with this above the fold section either. I just made what I could do the best for now. 100% this will be changed in the future once I can get a full fledged trailer.

As for the remaining points, they're are all good points, all noted. Thanks again for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#43

Post by famouswaffles »

AYBABTME wrote: post #10

Looks amazing, I'll try it out. This will save me a bunch of time copy-pasting words in Papago and trying to lookup the grammar's meaning on random websites.

This is a tool you might like

https://mirinae.io/

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#44

Post by mortallywounded »

First and foremost, congrats on shipping!

I am completely self taught.

My wife is Korean and I am not. We lived in Korea for 5+ years (but in the USA now). We have two children that speak English and Korean. My Korean comprehension is quite good. We are close to the Korean side of our family and we're surrounded by Korean all the time (even in the USA).

All of that is to give some context for how I learned Korean and what has worked (and didn't work) for me.

What has worked wonderfully:

1. Learn Hangul (Korean alphabet) immediately. You simply cannot learn or study Korean with romanization of any kind.

2. Deliberate textbook study with an emphasis on grammar (for example, Korean Grammar in Use by Darakwon).

3. Learning vocabulary in context of the grammar from #2. For example, take a noun/verb out of a new grammar structure and replace with new ones. Always study in the context of grammar and structure.

4. Listening comprehension through transcription. Given some Korean audio, listen and transcribe what is said in Korean. This certainly helps train your ear to pick up native Korean. Korean you hear from textbook audio is very easy and doesn't help in real life.

What did not work for me:

1. Using Anki to cram words in my head. Sure-- everyone can grab a 2k or 6k deck of words and memorize them, but you won't know how or when to use anything. You also won't be able to recall much of it.

2. Watching drama or reading webtoons. It's tempting to call this "studying" but it's really low bandwidth. What you get out of it is in no way at all related to the amount of time it takes. You'd be better off with 10 minutes and a textbook than a 50 minute drama that takes you 600 minutes to get through looking up words and grammar.

3. The cult/following of "total immersion/no output" which was born out of the Ajatt method of learning Japanese. It's baloney. Sorry if this includes your tool :)

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#45

Post by mortallywounded »

voussoir wrote: post #24
solidsnack9000 wrote: post #21

For the first year or so, pretty much everyone who's learning is going to need the romanization alongside / above the Hangul. It's probably always going to be true that more than 2/3 of your potential customers -- 2/3 of the people who come to the website looking to see if this is for them -- will be in this category. There is a kind of anti-pattern in tools of this kind where the people building them already know so…

I absolutely disagree. Romanized Korean is harder to read than Korean itself. The sounds implied by the roman spelling do not match the sounds you're supposed to make, and you lose the syllable boundaries that aid in pronunciation. I feel like a caveman stumbling over my letters when I try to read a romanized word. A one-page alphabet reference chart would be enough to remind the reader which letter is which without…

As someone that is self taught and fairly good at Korean-- I agree. Using romanization of any kind is a nightmare in Korean. The only way to really grasp the language is to be able to read Hangul as soon as possible.

Using romanization is a lot worse than in a language like Japanese. In Japanese the romanization somewhat maps well to Japanese. In Korean, the various romanization methods are horrendous and don't come close to Korean at all.

Not only that-- many grammar forms require understanding the Hangul vowels to understand how to conjugate them. If you're using romanization they don't exist.

Even worse, Korean sound change rules make it hard to read Hangul without a lot of practice. If you're using romanization you're completely doomed.

Re: Show HN: Kimchi Reader – Immersive Korean Learning with a Popup Dictionary

#46

Post by pthacker »

The integration with YouTube and Netflix is brilliant!

Some feedback: - The hero image is a bit vague, not sure what the product is, however, scrolling down a bit I see a great image of a K-Drama playing with the app in action, which was really impressive and informative - The tool tip background is transparent so hard to read the text in it as it gets mixed with the background

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